Social Justice Postmodernism and the City

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Social Justice, Postmodernism and the City*

DAVID HARVEY

The title of this essay is a collage of two book titles of mine written nearly 20 years apart,Social justice and the city and The condition of postmodernity. I here want to considerthe relations between them, in part as a way to reflect on the intellectual and politicaljourney many have travelled these last two decades in their attempts to grapple with urbanissues, but also to examme how we now might think about urban problems and how by

virtue of such thinking we can better position ourselves with respect to solutions. Thequestion ofpositionality is, I shall argue, fundamental to all debates about how to createinfrastructures and urban environments for living and working in the twenty-first century.

Justice and the postmodern condition

I begin with a report by John Kifner in the International Herald Tribune (1 August 1989)concerning the hotly contested space of Tompkins Square Park in New York City - aspace which has been repeatedly fought over, often violently, since the 'police riot' ofAugust 1988. The neighbourhood mix around the park was the primary focus of Kifner'sattention. Not only were there nearly 300 homeless people, but there were also:

Skateboarders, basketball players, mothers with small children, radicals looking like 1960sretreads, spikey-haired punk rockers in tom black, skinheads in heavy working boots lookingto beat up the radicals and punks, dreadlocked Rastafarians, heavy-metal bands, chess players,dog walkers - all occupy their spaces in the park, along with professionals carrying their dry-cleaned suits to the renovated 'gentrified' buildings that are changing the character of theneighbourhood.

By night, Kifner notes, the contrasts in the park become even more bizarre:

The Newcomers Motorcycle Club was having ItS annual block party at Its clubhouse at 12thStreet and Avenue B and the street was lined with chromed Harley Davidsons with raised 'ape-hanger' handlebars and beefy men and hefty women in black leather. A block north a rock concerthad spilled out of a 'squat' - an abandoned city-owned building taken over by outlaw renovators,mostly young artists - and the street was filled with young people whose purple hair stoodstraight up in spikes. At the World Club Just off Houston Street near Avenue C, black youthspulled up in the Jeep-type vehicles favored by cash-heavy teen-age crack moguls, high poweredspeakers blaring. At the comer of Avenue B and Third, considered one of the worst heroinblocks in New York, another concert was going on at an artists' space called The Garage, setin a former gas station walled off by plastic bottles and other found objects. The wall formedan enclosed garden looking up at burned-out. abandoned buildings: there was an eerie resemblanceto Beirut. The crowd was white and fashionably dressed, and a police sergeant sent to checkon the noise shook his head, bemused. 'It's all yuppies'.

* This IS the text of a plenary paper delivered III Berlin on 9 October 1991 to the European Workshop onthe hnprovement of the Built Environment and SOCialIntegration III Cities, sponsored by the European Foundationfor the hnprovement of Living and Working Conditions reproduced here Withthe permission of the European



for the hnprovement of Living and Working Conditions It IS reproduced here Withthe permission of the European

Social justice, postmodernism and the city 589

This is, of course, the kind of scene that makes New York such a fascinating place,

that makes any great city into a stimulating and exciting maelstrom of cultural conflict

and change. It is the kind of scene that many a student of urban subcultures would revel

in, even seeing in it, as someone like lain Chambers (1987) does, the origins of that

distinctive perspective we now call 'the postmodern':

Postmodermsm, whatever form Its intellectualizing might take, has been fundamentally anticipatedInthe metropolitan cultures of the last twenty years: among the electronic signifiers of cinema,television and video, in recording studios and record players, III fashion and youth styles, inall those sounds, images and diverse histories that are daily mixed, recycled and 'scratched'together on that giant screen that is the contemporary city.

Armed with that insight, we could take the whole paraphernalia of postmodern

argumentation and technique and try to 'deconstruct' the seemingly disparate images on

that giant screen which is the city. We could dissect and celebrate the fragmentation, the

co-presence of multiple discourses - of music, street and body language, dress and

technological accoutrements (such as the Harley Davidsons) - and. perhaps, develop

sophisticated empathies with the multiple and contradictory codings with which highly

differentiated social beings both present themselves to each other and to the world and

live out their daily lives. We could affirm or even celebrate the bifurcations in cultural

trajectory, the preservation of pre-existing and the creation of entirely new but distinctive

'othernesses' within an otherwise homogenizing world.

On a good day, we could celebrate the scene within the park as a superb example

of urban tolerance for difference, an exemplar of what Iris Marion Young calls 'openness

to unassimilated otherness'. In a just and civilized society, she argues, the normative ideal

of city life:

instantiates social relations of difference without exclusion. Different groups dwell III the cityalongside one another, of necessity interacting in city spaces. If city politics is to be democratic

and not dominated by the point of view of one group, it must be a politics that takes accountof and provides voice for the different groups that dwell together Inthe city without forminga community. (Young, 1990: 227)

To the degree that the freedom of city life 'leads to group differentiation, to the

formation of affinity groups' (ibid.: 238) of the sort which Kifner identifies in Tompkins

Square, so our conception of social justice 'requires not the melting away of differences,

but institutions that promote reproduction of and respect for group differences without

oppression' (p. 47). We must reject 'the concept of universality as embodied in republican

versions of Enlightenment reason' precisely because it sought to 'suppress the popular

and linguistic heterogeneity of the urban public' (p. 108). 'In open and accessible public

spaces and forums, one should expect to encounter and hear from those who are different,whose social perspectives, experience and affiliations are different. ' It then follows, Young

argues, that a politics of inclusion 'must promote the ideal of a heterogeneous public,

in which persons stand forth with their differences acknowledged and respected, though

perhaps not completely understood, by others' (p. 119).

In similar vein, Roberto Unger, the philosophical guru of the critical legal studies

movement in the United States, might view the park as a manifestation of a new ideal

of community understood as a 'zone of heightened mutual vulnerability, within which

people gain a chance to resolve more fully the conflict between the enabling conditions

of self-assertion; between their need for attachment and for participation in group life

and their fear of SUbjugation and depersonalization with which such engagement may threaten

them' (Unger, 1987: 562). Tompkins Square seems a place where the 'contrast betweenstructure-preserving routine and structure transforming conflict' softens in such a way



590 David Harvey

contrasts'. The square might even be interpreted as a site of that 'microlevel of cultural-revolutionary defiance and incongruity' which periodically wells upwards into 'themacrolevel of institutional innovation' (ibid: 564). Unger is acutely aware, however, thatthe temptation to 'treat each aspect of cultural revolution as a pretext for endless self-gratification and self-concern' can lead to a failure to 'connect the revolutionary reformof institutional arrangements with the cultural-revolutionary remaking of personal relations' .

So what should the urban policy-maker do in the face of these strictures? The bestpath is to pull out that well-thumbed copy of Jane Jacobs (1961) and insist that we shouldboth respect and provide for 'spontaneous self-diversification among urban populations'in the formulation of our policies and plans. In so doing we can avoid the critical wrathshe directs at city designers, who 'seem neither to recognize this force for self-diversificationnor to be attracted by the esthetic problems of expressing it'. Such a strategy can helpus live up to expectations of the sort which Young and Unger lay down. We should not,in short, aim to obliterate differences within the park, homogenize it according to someconception of, say, bourgeois taste or social order. We should engage, rather, with anaesthetics which embraces or stimulates that 'spontaneous self-diversification' of whichJacobs speaks. Yet there is an immediate question mark over that suggestion: in what

ways, for example, can homelessness be understood as spontaneous self-diversification,and does this mean that we should respond to that problem with designer-style cardboardboxes to make for more jolly and sightly shelters for the homeless? While Jane Jacobshas a point, and one which many urbanists have absorbed these last few years, there is,evidently, much more to the problem than her arguments encompass.

That difficulty is highlighted on a bad day in the park. So-called forces of law andorder battle to evict the homeless, erect barriers between violently clashing factions. Thepark then becomes a locus of exploitation and oppression, an open wound from whichbleed the five faces of oppression which Young defines as exploitation, marginalization,powerlessness, cultural imperialism and violence. The potentiality for 'openness tounassimilated otherness' breaks apart and, in much the same way that the cosmopolitanand eminently civilized Beirut of the 1950s suddenly collapsed into an urban maelstromof warring factions and violent confrontation, so we find sociality collapsing into violence(see Smith, 1989; 1992). This is not unique to New York City but is a condition of urbanlife in many of our large metropolitan areas - witness events in the banlieues of Parisand Lyons, in Brussels, in Liverpool, London and even Oxford in recent times.

In such circumstances Young's pursuit of a vision of justice that is assertive as todifference without reinforcing the forms of oppression gets torn to tatters and Unger'sdreams of micro-revolutions in cultural practices which stimulate progressive rather thanrepressive institutional innovation become just that - dreams. The very best face thatwe can put upon the whole scene is to recognize that this is how class, ethnic, racial and

gender struggle is, as Lefebvre (1991) would put it, being 'inscribed in space'. And whatshould the planner do? Here is how a subsequent article in the New York Times reflectedon that dilemma:

There are neighborhood associations clamoring for the city to close the park and others justas insistent that it remain a refuge for the city's downtrodden. The local Assemblyman, StevenSanders, yesterday called for a/curfew that would effectively evict more than a hundred homelesspeople camped out in the park. Councilwoman Minam Friedlander instead recommended thatSocial Services, like healthcare and drug treatment, be brought directly to the people living inthe tent city. 'We do not find the park is being used appropriately', said Deputy Mayor BarbaraJ. Fife, 'but we recognise there are various interests'. There is, they go on to say, only onething that is a consensus, first that there isn't a consensus over what should be done, except

that any new plan is likely to provoke more disturbances, more violence.

On 8 June 1991, the question was resolved by evicting everyone from the park and closing



On 8 June 1991, the question was resolved by evicting everyone from the park and closing


New York authorities, situated on what Davis (1990: 224) calls 'the bad edge of

postmodernity, militarize rather than liberate It s public space, In so doing, power is deployed

in support of a middle-class quest for 'personal insulation, in residential work, consumption

and travel environments, from "unsavory" groups and individuals, even crowds in general'.

Genuinely public space is extinguished, militarized or semi-privatized. The heterogeneity

of open democracy, the mixing of classes, ethnicities, religions and divergent taste cultures

within a common frame of public space is lost along with the capacity to celebrate unity

and community in the midst of diversity. The ultimate irony, as Davis points out, is that'as the walls have come down in Eastern Europe, they are being erected all over [our

cities]' .

And what should the policy-maker and planner do in the face of these conditions?

Give up planning and join one of those burgeoning cultural studies programmes which

revel in chaotic scenes of the Tompkins Square sort while simultaneously disengaging

from any commitment to do something about them? Deploy all the critical powers of

deconstruction and semiotics to seek new and engaging interpretations of graffiti which

say 'Die, Yuppie Scum'? Should we join revolutionary and anarchist groups and fight

for the rights of the poor and the culturally marginalized to express their rights and if

necessary make a home for themselves in the park? Or should we thIOW away that dog-

eared copy of Jane Jacobs and join with the forces of law and order and help impose someauthoritarian solution on the problem?

Decisions of some sort have to be made and actions taken, as about any other facet

of urban infrastructure. And while we might all agree that an urban park is a good thing

in principle, what are we to make of the fact that the uses turn out to be so conflictual,

and that even conceptions as to what the space is for and how it is to be managed diverge

radically among competing factions? To hold all the divergent politics of need and desire

together within some coherent frame may be a laudable aim, but in practice far too many

of the interests are mutually exclusive to allow their mutual accommodation. Even the

best shaped compromise (let alone the savagely imposed authoritarian solution) favours

one or other factional interest. And that provokes the biggest question of all - what IS

the conception of 'the public' incorporated into the construction of public space?

To answer these questions requires some deeper understanding of the forces at work

shaping conflict in the park. Kifner identified drugs and real estate - 'the two most powerful

forces in [New York City] today'. Both of them are linked to organized crime and are

major pillars of the political economy of contemporary capitalism. We cannot understand

events within and around the park or strategize as to its future uses without contextualizing

it against a background of the political-economic transformations now occurring in urban

life. The problems of Tompkins Square Park have, in short, to be seen in terms of social

processes which create homelessness, promote criminal activities of many sorts (from real

estate swindles and the crack trade to street muggings), generate hierarchies of power

between gentrifiers and the homeless, and facilitate the emergence of deep tensions alongthe major social fault-lines of class, gender, ethnicity, race and religion, lifestyle and place-

bound preferences (see Smith, 1992).

Social justice and modernity

I now leave this very contemporary situation and its associated conundrums and turn to

an older story. It turned up when I unearthed from my files a yellowing manuscript, written

sometime in the early 1970s, shortly after I finished Social justice and the city. I thereexamined the case of a proposal to put a segment of the Interstate Highway System on

an east-west trajectory right through the heart of Baltimore - a proposal first set outin the early 1940s and which has still not been fully resolved. I resurrect this case here



592 David Harvey

problem was even at that time argued about in ways which contained the seeds, if notthe essence, of much of what many now view as a distinctively postmodernist form ofargumentation.

My interest in the case at that time, having looked at a lot of the discussion, attendedhearings and read a lot of documentation, lay initially in the highly differentiated arguments,articulated by all kinds of different groups, concerning the rights and wrongs of the wholeproject. There were, Ifound, seven kinds of arguments being put forward:(1) An efficiency argument which concentrated on the relief of traffic congestion and

facilitating the easier flow of goods and people throughout the region as well as WIthinthe city;

(2) An economic growth argument which looked to a projected increase (or preventionof loss) in investment and employment opportunities in the city consequent uponimprovements in the transport system;

(3) An aesthetic and historical heritage argument which objected to the way sections ofthe proposed highway would either destroy or diminish urban environments deemedboth attractive and of historical value;

(4) A social and moral order argument which held that prioritizing highway investmentand subsidizing car owners rather than, for example. investing in housing and healthcare was quite wrong;

(5) An environmentalist/ecological argument which considered the impacts of the proposedhighway on air quality, noise pollution and the destruction of certain valuedenvironments (such as a river valley park);

(6) A distributive justice argument which dwelt mainly on the benefits to business andpredominantly white middle-class suburban commuters to the detriment oflow-incomeand predominantly African-American inner-city residents;

(7) A neighbourhood and communitarian argument which considered the way in whichclose-knit but otherwise fragile and vulnerable communities might be destroyed, dividedor disrupted by highway construction.

The arguments were not mutually exclusive, of course, and several of themwere mergedby proponents of the highway into a common thread - for example, the efficiency ofthe transport system would stimulate growth and reduce pollution from congestion so asto advantage otherwise disadvantaged inner-city residents. Itwas also possible to breakup each argument into quite distinct parts - the distributive impacts on women with childrenwould be very different from those on male workers.

We would, in these heady postmodern times, be prone to describe these separatearguments as 'discourses'. each with its own logic and imperatives. And we would nothave to look too closely to see particular 'communities of interest' which articulated aparticular discourse as if it was the only one that mattered. The particularistic arguments

advanced by such groups proved effective in altering the alignment of the highway butdid not stop the highway as a whole. The one group which tried to forge a coalition outof these disparate elements (theMovement Against Destruction, otherwise known asMAD)and to provide an umbrella for opposition to the highway as a whole turned out to bethe least effective in mobilizing people and constituencies even though itwas very articulatein its arguments.

The purpose of my own particular enquiry was to see how the arguments (or discourses)for and against the highway worked and if coalitions could be built in principle betweenseemingly disparate and often highly antagonistic interest groups via the construction ofhigher order arguments (discourses) which could provide the basis for consensus. Themultiplicity of views and forces has to be set against the fact that either the highway is

built or it is not, although in Baltimore, with its wonderful way of doing things, we endedup with a portion of the highway that is called a boulevard (to make us understand thatthis six-lane two-mile segment of a monster cut through the heart of low-income and




predominantly African-American West Baltimore is not what it really 1S) and another route

on a completely different alignment, looping around the city core in such a way as to

allay some of the worst political fears of influential communities.

Might there be, then, some higher-order discourse to which everyone could appeal

IIIworking out whether or not it made sense to build the highway? A dominant theme

in the hterature of the 1960s was that it was possible to identify some such higher-order

arguments. The phrase that was most frequently used to describe it was social rationality.

The Idea of that did not seem implausible, because each of the seven seemingly distinctivearguments advanced a rational position of some sort and not infrequently appealed to some

higher-order rationale to bolster its case Those arguing on efficiency and growth grounds

frequently invoked utilitarian arguments, notions of 'public good' and the greatest benefit

to the greatest number. while recognizing (at their best) that individual sacrifices were

inevitable and that it was right and proper to offer appropriate compensation for those

who would be displaced. Ecologists or communitarians likewise appealed to higher-order

arguments - the former to the values inherent in nature and the latter to some higher

sense of commumtarian values. For all of these reasons, consideration of higher-order

arguments over social rationality did not seem unreasonable.

Dahl and Lindblom's Politics, economics and welfare, published in 1953, provides

a classic statement along these lines. They argue that not only is socialism dead (a conclusion

that many would certainly share these days) but also that capitalism ISequally dead. What

they signal by this IS an intellectual tradition which arose out of the experience of the

vast market and capitalistic failure of the Great Depression and the second world war

and which concluded that some kind of middle ground had to be found between the

extremism of a pure and unfettered market economy and the communist vision of an

organized and highly centralized economy. They concentrated their theory on the question

of rational social action and argued that this required 'processes for both rational calculationand effective control' (p. 21). Rational calculation and control, as far as they were concerned,

depended upon the exercise of rational calculation through price-fixing markets, hierarchy

(top-down decision-making), polyarchy (democratic control ofleadership) and bargaining(negonarion). and such means should be deployed to achieve the goals of 'freedom,

rationality, democracy, subjective equality, security. progress, and appropriate inclusion'

(p. 28). There is much that is interesting about Dahl and Lindblom's analysis and it IS

not too hard to imagine that after the recent highly problematic phase of market triumphal ism ,

particularly in Britain and the United States, there win be some sort of search to resurrect

the formulations they proposed. But in so doing it is also useful to remind ourselves of

the intense criticism that was levelled during the 1960s and 1970s against their search

for some universal prospectus on the socially rational society of the future.

Godelier, for example, in his book on Rationality and irrationality tn economics,savagely attacked the socialist thinking of Oscar Lange for its teleological view of rationahty

and its presumption that socialism should or could ever be the ultimate achievement ofthe rational life. Godelier did not attack this notion from the right hut from a marxist

and historical materialist perspective. His point was that there are different definitions

of rationality depending upon the form of social organization and that the rationality

embedded in feudalism is different from that of capitalism. which should, presumably,

be different again under socialism. Rationality defined from the standpoint of corporate

capital is quite different from rationality deflned from the standpoint of the working classes.

Work of this type helped to fuel the growing radical critique of even the non-teleological

and incrementalist thinking of the Dahl and Lindblom sort. "This critique suggested that

their definition of social rationality was connected to the perpetuation and rational

manaf-Sement of a capitalist economic system rather than with the exploration of alternatives.

To attack (or deconstruct, as we now would put it) their conception of social rationalitywas seen by the left at the time as a means 10 challenge the ideological hegemony of a



dominant corporate capitalism. Feminists, those marginalized by racial characteristics.

594 David Harvey

colonized peoples, ethnic and religious minorities echoed that refrain in their work, whileadding their own conception of who was the enemy to be challenged and what were thedominant forms of rationality to be contested. The result was to show emphatically thatthere is no overwhelming and universally acceptable definition of social rationality to whichwe might appeal, but innumerable different rationalities depending upon social and materialcircumstances, group identities, and social objectives. Rationality is defined by the natureof the social group and its project rather than the project being dictated by social rationality.

The deconstruction of universal claims of social rationality was one of the majorachievements and continues to be one of the major legacies of the radical critique of the1960s and 1970s.

Such a conclusion is, however, more than a little discomforting. Itwould suggest"to go back to the highway example, that there was no point whatsoever in searching forany higher-order arguments because such arguments simply could nothave any purchase:upon the political process of decision-making. And it is indeed striking that the one groupthat tried to build such overall arguments, MAD, was the group that was least successfulinactually mobilizing opposition. The fragmented discourses of those who sought to changethe alignment of the highway had more effect than the more unified discourse preciselybecause the former were grounded in the specific and particular local circumstances in

which individuals found themselves. Yet the fragmented discourses could never go beyondchallenging the alignment of the highway. It did indeed need a more unified discourse,of the sort which MAD sought to articulate, to challenge the concept of the highway ingeneral.

This poses a direct dilemma. If we accept that fragmented discourses are the onlyauthentic discourses and that no unified discourse is possible, then there is no way tochallenge the overall.qualities ofa social system. To mount that more general challengewe need some kind of unified or unifying set of arguments. For this reason, I chose, inthis ageing and yellowing manuscript, to take a closer .look at the particular question ofsocial justice as a basic ideal that might have more universal appeal.

Social justice

Social.justice is but one of the seven criteria I worked with and I evidently hoped thatcareful investigation of it might rescue the argument from the abyss of formless relativismand infinitely variable discourses and interest grouping. But here too the enquiry provedfrustrating. It revealed that there are as many competing theories of social justice as thereare competing ideals of social rationality. Each ideal has its flaws and strengths. Egalitarianviews, for example, immediately run into the problem that 'there is nothing more unequalthan the equal treatment of unequals' (themodification of doctrines of equality of opportunity

in the United States by requirements for affirmative action, for example, recognizes whata significant.problem that is). By the time I had thoroughly reviewed positive law theoriesof justice, utilitarian views (the greatest good of the greatest number), social contract viewshistorically attributed to Rousseau and powerfully revived by John Rawls in his Theoryof justice in the early 1970s, the various intuitionist, relative deprivation and otherinterpretations of justice, I found myself in a quandary as to precisely which theory ofjustice is the most just. The theories can, to some degree, be arranged in a hierarchy withrespect to each other. The positive law view that justice is a matter oflaw can be challengedby a utilitarian view which allows us to discriminate between good and bad law on thebasis of some greater good, while the social contract and natural rights views suggestthat 1 1 0 ·amount of greater good for a great~r number can justify the violation of certain

inalienahle,rights. On the other hand, intuitionist and relative deprivation theories existin an entirely different dimension.



Social justice, postmodernism and the dry 595

of some initial criteria to define which theory of social justice was appropriate or more

just than another. The infmite regress of higher-order criteria Immediately looms, as does,

in the other direction, the relative ease of total deconstruction of the notion of justice to

the point where it means nothing whatsoever, except whatever people at some particular

moment decide they want it to mean. Competing discourses about justice could not be

dissassociated from competing discourses about positionality in society.

There seemed two ways to go with that argument. The first was to look all how conceptsof justice are embedded in language, and that led me to theories of meaning of the sort

which Wittgenstein advanced:

How many kinds of sentence are there? ... There are countless kinds: countless different kindsof use to what we call 'symbols', 'words', 'sentences'. And this multiplicity is not somethingfixed. given once for all: but new types of language, new language games, as we may say, comeinto existence and others become obsolete and get forgotten ... Here the term 'language-game'is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity,or a form of life. . How did we learn the meaning of this word ('good' for instance)? Fromwhat sort of examples? in what language games? Then tt will be easier for us to see that theword must have a family of meanings. (Wittgenstein, 1967)

From this perspective the concept of justice has to be understood in the way it is embedded

in a particular language game. Each language game attaches to the particular social,

experiential and perceptual world of the speaker. Justice has no universal meaning, but

a whole 'family' of meanings. This finding is completely consistent, of course, with

anthropological studies which show that justice among, say, the Nuer, means something

completely different from the capitalistic conception of justice. We are back to the point

of cultural, linguistic or discourse relativism.

The second path is to admit the relativism of discourses about justice, but to insist

that discourses are expressions of social power. In this case the idea of justice has to be

set against the formation of certain hegemonic discourses which derive from the power

exercised by any ruling class. This is an idea which goes back to Plato, who in the Republichas Thrasymachus argue that:

Each ruling class makes laws that are inits own interest, a democracy democratic laws, a tyrannytyrannical ones and so on; and in making these laws they define as 'right' for their subjectswhat is in the interest of themselves, the rulers, and if anyone breaks their laws he is punishedas a 'wrong-doer'. That ISwhat Imean when Isay that 'right' is the same in all states. namelythe interest of the established ruling class (Plato, 1965)

Consideration of these two paths brought me to accept a position which is most clearly

articulated by Engels in the following terms:

The stick used to measure what is right and what ISnot IS the most abstract expressIOn of nght

itself, namely justice ... The development of right for the Jurists ... is nothing more than astriving to bring human conditions, so far as they are expressed in legal terms. ever closer tothe ideal of justice, eternal justice. And always this justice is but the Ideologized, glorifiedexpression of the existing economic relations, now from their conservative and now from theirrevolutionary angle. The justice of the Greeks and Romans held slavery to be Just. the justiceof IDebourgeois of 1789 demanded the abolition of feudalism on the ground it was unjust. Theconceptron of eternal justice. therefore, varies not only with time and place, but also with thepersons concerned ... While in everday life ... expressions like right. wrong. justice. andsense of right are accepted without misunderstanding even with reference to SOCIalmatters, theycreate ... the same hopeless confusion m any scientific investigation of economic relations aswould be created, for instance, in modem chemistry if the termmology of the phlogiston theorywere to be retained. (Marx and Engels, 1951' 562-4)

It is a short step from this conception to Marx's critique of Proudhon, who, Marx

claimed, took his ideal of justice 'from the juridical relations that correspond



(1967: 88-9) claimed, took his ideal of justice 'from the juridical relations that correspond

596 David Harvey

as 'a form of production as everlasting as justice'. The parallel with Godelier's rebuttalof Lange's (and by extension Dahl and Lindblom's) views on rationality is exact. Takingcapitalistic notions of social rationality or of justice, and treating them as universal valuesto be deployed under socialism, would merely mean the deeper instanciation of capitalistvalues by way of the socialist project.

The transition from modernist to postmodernist discourses

There are two general points I wish to draw out of the argument so far. First, the critiqueof social rationality and of conceptions such as social justice as policy tools was somethingthat was originated and so ruthlessly pursued by the'left' (including marxists) in the 1960sthat it began to generate radical doubt throughout civil society as to the veracity of alluniversal claims. From this it was a short, though as I shall shortly argue, unwarranted,step to conclude, as many postmodernists now do, that all forms of metatheory are eithermisplaced or illegitimate. Both steps in this process were further reinforced by the emergenceof the so-called 'new' social movements - the peace and women's movements, the

ecologists, the movements against colonization and racism - each of which came toarticulate its own definitions of social justice and rationality. There then seemed to be,as Engels had argued, no philosophical, linguistic or logical way to resolve the resultingdivergencies in conceptions of rationality and justice, and thereby to find a way to reconcilecompeting claims or arbitrate between radically different discourses. The effect was toundermine the legitimacy of state policy, attack all conceptions of bureaucratic rationalityand at best place social policy formulation in a quandary and at worst render it powerlessexcept to articulate the ideological and value precepts of those in power. Some of thosewho participated in the revolutionary movements of the 1970s and 1980s considered thatrendering transparent the power and class basis of supposedly universal claims was anecessary prelude to mass revolutionary action.

But there is a second and, I think, more subtle point to be made. If Engels is indeedright to insist that the conception of justice 'varies not only with time and place, but alsowith the persons concerned' , then it seems important to look at the ways in which a particularsociety produces such variation in concepts. In so doing it seems important, followingwriters as diverse as Wittgenstein and Marx, to look at the material basis for the productionof difference, in particular at the production of those radically different experiential worldsout of which divergent language games about social rationality and social justice couldarise. This entails the application of historical-geographical materialist methods andprinciples to understand the production of those power differentials which in turn producedifferent conceptions of justice and embed them in a struggle over ideological hegemonybetween classes, races, ethnic and political groupings as well as across the gender divide.The philosophical, linguistic and logical critique of universal propositions such as justiceand of social rationality can be upheld as perfectly correct without necessarily endangeringthe ontological or epistemological status of a metatheory which confronts the ideologicaland material functionings and bases of particular discourses. Only in this way can webegin to understand why it is that concepts such as justice which appear as 'hopelesslyconfused' when examined in abstraction can become such a powerful mobilizing forcein everyday life, where, again to quote Engels, 'expressions like right, wrong, justice,and sense of right are accepted without misunderstanding even with reference to socialmatters' .

From this standpoint we can clearly see that concepts of justice and of rationality

have not disappeared from our social and political world these last few years. But theirdefinition and use has changed. The collapse of class compromise in the struggles of thelate 1960s and the emergence of the socialist, communist and radical left movements,




threat to the stability of the capitalist political-economic system. At the ideological level,

the emergence of alternative definitions of both justice and rationality was part of that

attack, and it was to this question that my earlier book, Social justice and the city, wasaddressed. But the recession/depression of 1973-5 signalled not only the savage devaluation

of capital stock (through the first wave of deindustrialization visited upon the weaker sectors

and regions of a world capitalist economy) but the beginning of an attack upon the power

of organized labour via widespread unemployment. austerity programmes, restructuringand, eventually, in some instances (such as Britain) institutional reforms.

Itwas under such conditions that the left penchant for attacking what was interpreted

as a capitalist power basis within the welfare state (with its dominant notions of social

rationality and just redistributions) connected to an emerging right-wing agenda to de-

fang the power of welfare state capitalism, to get away from any notion whatsoever of

a SOCial contract between capital and labour and to abandon political notions of social

rationality in favour of market rationality. The important point about this transition, which

was phased in over a number of years, though at a quite different pace from country to

country (it is only now seriously occurring in Sweden, for example), was that the state

was no longer obliged to define rationality and justice, since it was presumed that the

market could best do it for us. The idea that just deserts are best arrived at through marketbehaviours, that a just distribution is whatever the market dictates and that a just organization

of social life, of urban investments and of resource allocations (including those usually

referred to as environmental) is best arrived at through the market is, of course, relatively

old and well-tried. It implies conceptions of justice and. rationality of a certain sort, rather

than their total abandonment. Indeed, the idea that the market is the best way to achieve

the most just and the most rational forms of social organization has become a powerful

feature of the hegemonic discourses these last 20 years in both the United States and Britain.

The collapse of centrally planned economies throughout much of the world has further

boosted a market triumphalism which presumes that the rough justice administered through

the market in the course of this transition is not only socially just but also deeply rational.

The advantage of this solution. of course, is that there is no need for explicit theoretical,

political and social argument over what is or is not socially rational just because it can

be presumed that, provided the market functions properly, the outcome is nearly always

just and rational. Universal claims about rationality and justice have in no way diminished.

They are just as frequently asserted in justification of privatization and of market action

as they ever were in support of welfare state capitalism.

The dilemmas inherent in reliance on the market are well known and no one holds

to it without some qualification. Problems of market breakdown, of externality effects,

the provision of public goods and infrastructures. the clear need for some coordinationof disparate investment decisions, all of these require some level of government

interventionism. Margaret Thatcher may thus have abolished Greater London government.but the business community wants some kind of replacement (though preferably non-elected).

because without it city services are disintegrating and London is losing its competiti ve

edge. But there are many voices that go beyond that minimal requirement since free-market

capitalism has produced widespread unemployment, radical restructurings and devaluations

of capital, slowgrowth, environmental degradation and a whole host of financial scandals

and competitive difficulties, to say nothing of the widening disparities in income distributions

III many countries and the social stresses that attach thereto. It is under such conditions

that the never quite stilled voice of state regulation, welfare state capitalism, of state

management of industrial development, of state planning of environmental quality, land

use, transportation systems and physical and SOCIalinfrastructures, of state incomes and

taxation policies which achieve a modicum of redistribution either in kind (via housing,health care, educational services and the like) or through income transfers, is being



reasserted. The political questions of social rationality and of social justice over and above

598 David Harvey

the forefront of the political agenda in many of the advanced capitalist countries. Itwas

exactly in this mode, of course, that Dahl and Lindblom came in back in 1953.

It is here that we have to face up to what Unger calls the 'ideological embarrassment'

of the history of politics these last hundred years: its tendency to move merely in repetitive

cycles, swinging back and forth between laissez-faire and state interventionism without,

it seems, finding any way to break out of this binary opposition to turn a spinning wheel

of stasis into a spiral of human development. The breakdown of organized communismin eastern Europe and the Soviet Union here provides a major opportunity precisely because

of the radical qualities of the break. Yet there are few signs of any similar penchant for

ideological and institutional renovation in the advanced capitalist countries, which at best

seem to. be steering towards another bout of bureaucratic management of capitalism

embedded in a general politics of the Dahl and Lindblom sort and at worst to be continuing

down the blind ideological track which says that the market always knows best. It is precisely

at this political conjuncture that we should remind ourselves of what the radical critique

of universal claims of justice and rationality has been all about, without falling into the

postmodernist trap of denying the validity of any appeal to justice or to rationality as a

war cry for political mobilization (even Lyotard, that father figure of postmodern philosophy,

hopes for the reassertion of some 'pristine and non-consensual conception of justice' asa means to find a new kind of politics).

For my own part, I think Engels had it right. Justice and rationality take on different

meanings across space and time and persons, yet the existence of everyday meanings to

which people do attach importance and which to them appear unproblematic, gives the

terms a political and mobilizing power that can never be neglected. Right and wrong are

words that power revolutionary changes and no amount of negative deconstruction of such

terms can deny that. So where, then, have the new social movements and the radical left

in general got with their own conception, and how does it challenge both market and

corporate welfare capitalism?

Young in her Justice and the politics of difference (1990) provides one of the best

recent statements. She redefines the question of justice away from the purely redistributive

mode of welfare state capitalism and focuses on what she calls the 'five faces' of oppression,

and I think each of them is worth thinking about as we consider the struggle to create

liveable cities and workable environments for the twenty-first century.

The first face of oppression conjoins the classic notion of exploitation in the workplace

with the more recent focus on exploitation of labour in the living place (primarily, of course,

that of women working in the domestic sphere). The classic forms of exploitation which

Marx described are still omnipresent, though there have been many mutations such that,

for example, control over the length of the working day may have been offset by increasing

intensity of labour or exposure to more hazardous health conditions not only in blue-collar

but also in white-collar occupations. The mitigation of the worst aspects of exploitationhas been, to some degree, absorbed into the logic of welfare state capitalism in part through

the sheer exercise of class power and trade union muscle. Yet there are still many terrains

upon which chronic exploitation can be identified and which will only be addressed to

the degree that active struggle raises issues. The conditions of the unemployed, the homeless,

the lack of purchasing power for basic needs and services for substantial portions of the

population (immigrants, women, children) absolutely have to be addressed. All of which

leads to my first proposition: that just planning and policy practices must confront directly

the problem of creating forms of social and political organization and systems of production

and consumption which minimize the exploitation of labour power both in the workplace

and the living place.

The second face of oppression arises out of what Young calls marginalization.'Marginals', she writes, 'are people the system of labour cannot or will not use.' This

is most typically the case with individuals marked by race, ethnicity, region, gender,



Social justice, postmodernism and the ciry 599

is expelled from useful participation in social life and thus potentially subjected to severe

material deprivation and even extermination'. The characteristic response of welfare state

capitalism has been either to place such marginal groups under tight surveillance or, at

best, to induce a condition of dependency in which state support provides a justification

to 'suspend all basic rights to privacy, respect. and individual choice'. The responses among

the marginalized have sometimes been both violent and vociferous, in some instances turning

their marginalization into a heroic stand against the state and against any form of inclusion

into what has for long only ever offered them oppressive surveillance and demeaning

subservience. Marginality is one of the crucial problems facing urban life in the twenty-

first century and consideration of it leads to the second principle: that just planning andpolicy practices must confront the phenomenon of marginalization in a non-paternalisticmode and find ways to organize and militate within the politics of marginalization in sucha way as to liberate captive groups from this distinctive form of oppression ..

Powerlessness is, in certain ways. an even more widespread problem than

marginality. We are here talking of the ability to express political power as well as to engage

in the particular politics of self-expression which we encountered in Tompkins Square

Park. The ability to be listened to with respect is strictly circumscribed within welfare

state capitalism and failure on this score has played a key role in the collapse of statecommunism. Professional groups have advantages in this regard which place them in a

different category to most others and the temptation always stands. for even the most

politlcized of us, to speak for others without listening to them. Political inclusion IS, if

anything, diminished by the decline of trade unionism, of political parties, and of traditional

institutions, yet it is at the same time revived by the organization of new social movements.

But the increasing scale of international dependency and interdependency makes it harder

and harder to offset powerlessness in general. Like the struggle against the Baltimore

expressway, the mobilization of political power among the oppressed in society is

increasingly a local affair, unable to address the structural characteristics of either market

or welfare state capitalism as a whole. This leads to my third proposition: just planning

and policy practices must empower rather than deprive the oppressed of access topoliticalpower and the ability to engage in self-expression.

What Young calls cultural imperialism relates to the ways in which 'the dominant

meanings of a society render the particular perspective of one's own group invisible at

the same time as they stereotype one's group and mark it out as the Other'. Arguments

of this sort have been most clearly articulated by feminists and black liberation theorists,

but they are also implicit in liberation theology as well as in many domains of cultural

theory. This is. in some respects, the most difficult form of oppression to identify clearly,

yet there can surely be no doubt that there are many social groups in our societies who

find or feel themselves 'defined from the outside, positioned, placed, by a network of

dominant meanings they experience as arising from elsewhere, from those with whom

they do not identify and who do not identify with them'. The alienation and social unrest

to be found in many western European and North American cities (to say nothing of its

re-emergence throughout much of eastern Europe) bears all the marks of a reaction to

cultural imperialism, and here too, welfare state capitalism has in the past proved both

unsympathetic and unmoved. From this comes a fourth proposition: that just planningand policy practices must be.particularly sensitive to issues of cultural imperialism andseek, by a variety (if means, to eliminate the imperialist attitude both in the design of urbanprojects and modes of popular consultation.

Fifth, there is the issue of violence. It is hard to consider urban futures and living

environments into the twenty-first century without confronting the problem of burgeoning

levels of physical violence. The fear of violence against persons and property, thoughoften exaggerated, has a material grounding in the social conditions of market capitalism

and calls for some kind of organized response. There is, furthermore, the intricate problem



600 David Harvey

state activities. The problem at the first level is, as Davis points out in his consideration

of Los Angeles, that the most characteristic response is to search for defensible urban

spaces, to militarize urban space and to create living environments which are more rather

than less exclusionary. The difficulty with the second level is that the equivalent of the

mafiosi in many cities (an emergent problem in the contemporary Soviet Union, for example)

has become so powerful in urban governance that it is they, rather than elected officials

and state bureaucrats, who hold the true reins of power. No society can function without

certain forms of social control and we have to consider what that might be in the face

of a Foucauldian insistence that all forms of social control are oppressive, no matter what

the level of violence to which they are addressed. Here too there are innumerable dilemmas

to be solved, but we surely know enough to advance a fifth proposition: a just planningand policy practice must seek out non-exclusionary and non-militarized forms of socialcontrol to contain the increasing levels of bothpersonal and institutionalized violence withoutdestroying capacities for empowerment and self-expression.

Finally, I want to add a sixth principle to those which Young advances. This derives

from the fact that all social projects are ecological projects and vice versa. While I resist

the view that 'nature has rights' or that nature can be 'oppressed', the justice due to future

generations and to other inhabitants of the globe requires intense scrutiny of all socialprojects for assessment of their ecological consequences. Human beings necessarily

appropriate and transform the world around them in the course of making their own history,

but they do not have to do so with such reckless abandon as to jeopardize the fate of peoples

separated from us in either space or time. The final proposition is, then: that just planningand policy practices will clearly recognize that the necessary ecological consequencesof all social projects have impacts on future generations as well as upon distant peoplesand take steps to ensure a reasonable mitigation of negative impacts.

\1 do not argue that these six principles can or even should be unified. let alone turned

into some convenient and formulaic composite strategy. Indeed, the six dimensions of

justice here outlined are frequently in conflict with each other as far as their application

to individual persons - the exploited male worker may be a cultural imperialist on mattersof race and gender while the thoroughly oppressed person may be the bearer of social

injustice as violence. On the other hand, I do not believe the principles can be applied

in isolation from each other either. Simply to leave matters at the level of a 'non-consensual'

conception of justice, as someone like Lyotard (1984) would do, is not to confront some

central issues of the social processes which produce such a differentiated conception of

justice in the first place. This then suggests that social policy and planning has to work

at two levels. The different faces of oppression have to be confronted for what they are

and as they are manifest in daily life, but in the longer term and at the same time the

underlying sources of the different forms of oppression in the heart of the political economy

of capitalism must also be confronted, not as the fount of all evil but in terms of capitalism's

revolutionary dynamic which transforms, disrupts, deconstructs and reconstructs waysofliving, working, relating to each other and to the environment. From such a standpoint

the issue is never about whether or not there shall be change, but what sort of change

we can anticipate, plan for, and proactively shape in the years to come.

I would hope that consideration of the varieties of justice as well as of this deeper

problematic might set the tone for present deliberations. By appeal to them, we might

see ways to break with the political, imaginative and institutional constraints which have

for too long inhibited the advanced capitalist societies in their developmental path. The

critique of universal notions of justice and rationality, no matter whether embedded in

the market or in state welfare capitalism, still stands. But it is both valuable and potentially

liberating to look at alternative conceptions of both justice and rationality as these have

emerged within the new social movements these last two decades. And while it will in

the end ever be true, as Marx and Plato observed, that 'between equal rights force decides',




and the inability to listen to alternative conceptions of both justice and rationality is verymuch a part of the problem. The conceptions I have outlined speak to many of themarginalized. the oppressed and the exploited in this time and place. For many of us,and for many of them, the formulations may well appear obvious, unproblematic and justplain common sense. And it is precisely because of such widely held conceptions thatso much welfare-state paternalism and market rhetoric fails. It is, by the same token,precisely out of such conceptions that a genuinely liberatory and transformative politicscan be made. 'Seize the time and the place', they would say around Tompkins SquarePark, and this does indeed appear an appropriate time and place to do so. If some of thewalls are corning down all over eastern Europe, then surely we can set about bringingthem down in our own cities as well.

David Harvey. Department of Geography. University of Oxford, Mansfield Road, Oxford OXl 3TB

AcknowledgementI am much indebted to Neil Smith for information and ideas about the struggles overTompkins Square Park.

References

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lntemanonal Herald Tribune, 1 August 1989. p. 6.Lefebvre, H. (1991) The production of space. Blackwell, Oxford.Lyotard, J. (1984) The postmodern condition. Manchester University Press. Manchester.Marx, K. (1967) Capital, vol. 1. International Publishers, New York.__ and F. Engels (1951) Selected works, vol. I. Progress Publishers, MoscowPlato (1965) The republic. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex.Rawls, J. (1971) A theory of justice. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.Smith, N. (1989) Tompkins Square: riots, rents and redskins. Portable Lower East Side 6. 1-36__ (1992) New city, new frontier: the Lower East Side as wild, wild west. In M. Sorkin (ed.),

Variations on a theme park: the new American city and the end of public space, Noonday, NewYork.

Unger. R. (1987) False necessity. anti-necessuarian social theory in the service of radical democracy.Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

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